https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/19/arts/music/max-morath-dead.html

Ex-Lawyer Who Killed Girlfriend Dies in Custody Days Before Sentencing

James Ray III faced a life sentence after being convicted of murder. He was found unconscious in his New Jersey jail cell on Father’s Day.

By Tracey Tully
June 19, 2023
James R. Ray III, a former New York City police officer and lawyer who was awaiting sentencing for murdering his longtime girlfriend, died on Sunday after being found unconscious in a New Jersey jail cell, according to Essex County officials.

Mr. Ray, 60, had been scheduled to be sentenced Thursday after being convicted last month of fatally shooting his girlfriend, Angela Bledsoe. The 2018 shooting occurred in the home they shared in Montclair, N.J., with their daughter, who was 6 years old at the time. He faced a life sentence.

Mr. Ray, who worked as a police officer before getting an M.B.A. and a law degree, was discovered in his cell at the Essex County Correctional Facility in Newark at about 6 p.m. Sunday, according to James Troisi, vice president of the union that represents the jail’s supervisors.

A spokesman for the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office confirmed that Mr. Ray had died, but said that an investigation was underway and that no additional details were immediately available, pending the results of an autopsy.

Ms. Bledsoe’s friends and relatives, many of whom traveled from out of state to watch most of the six-week trial from the front rows of the courtroom gallery, had been preparing statements that they had hoped Mr. Ray would hear before being sentenced.

Lisa LaBoo, Ms. Bledsoe’s sister, is raising her sister’s daughter, Alana, and noted the cruel timing of his death.

“On Father’s Day — my gosh,” Ms. LaBoo said in a brief interview from Florida.

Mr. Ray had been housed at the Essex County jail for more than four years after being arrested trying to enter Cuba about a week after the Oct. 22, 2018, shooting, which stunned the couple’s neighbors in Upper Montclair, one of the state’s most affluent neighborhoods.

Testimony showed that he had plotted his escape carefully. He printed out a will, typed a letter, withdrew cash and wrote checks before dropping Alana with his brother and beginning a cross-country odyssey. After leaving his car at Newark Liberty International Airport, he took a cab to Philadelphia, hitchhiked to Texas and took a bus into Mexico before boarding flights for Cuba.

During the trek, he wrote an 18-page journal in which he detailed some of his actions and claimed that he shot Ms. Bledsoe, 44, his girlfriend of nine years, in self-defense.

Jurors deliberated for only a few hours before voting to reject Mr. Ray’s claims, finding him guilty of murder and weapons charges.

On Monday, Phil Alagia, chief of staff to the Essex County executive, Joseph N. DiVincenzo, said that Mr. Ray had been taken to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

“A tragic ending to an already tragic story,” Brooke M. Barnett, one of two lawyers who represented Mr. Ray at trial, said Monday.

Last year, the Essex County Correctional Facility was under review by an independent team of consultants after a man was killed in 2021 after being stabbed by a fellow detainee, and a 22-year-old with schizophrenia, Jayshawn Boyd, was beaten so badly that he was left in a coma.

Last week, two of Mr. Boyd’s attackers, who were also detainees and were captured on a surveillance camera stomping on the young man’s head, were convicted of attempted murder. The September 2021 beating lasted at least two minutes and 11 seconds without any intervention by guards, according to a copy of the footage obtained by The New York Times.

After Mr. Ray’s death, the prosecutor’s office was contacted, and investigators will conduct an inquiry into his death, Mr. Alagia said.

Tracey Tully covers New Jersey. She joined The Times in 2018 as a senior editor. She previously covered city and state government at The Daily News, the Albany Times Union and the Jersey Journal. @traceytully